


for this empire, after night

by meritmut



Series: the blackest skies, the daunting stars [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Dreams, Enemies to...Something, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Forests
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-14 01:16:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12996666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: The darkness sings to her of vengeance, of a balancing of the scales, of amaking right.The Goazon haggler in her knows that blood will not pay for blood, and if Kylo can walk the hard road now then it would shame her to do less.It’s just—even after so many years, it’s hard thinking she doesn’t have to work alone anymore.The light at the end.





	for this empire, after night

**Author's Note:**

> and although the vows are broken i will meet you there / between the good and evil with the scars of where  
> all the words we left unspoken echo through the air
> 
> — ofelia, 'i will meet you there'

He calls to her, this time.

Over light-years of space, across an ocean of stars, he reaches out through the Force, the bond between them flickering into life as he comes to her after months of near-silence. He finds her in the middle of a sleep cycle, and opts to rouse her gently lest she take his head off when she wakes.

With a patience that would astonish Rey (were she coherent enough to appreciate it), Kylo sets himself to nudging her slowly into consciousness. He fills her dreams with visions of a world the colour of nightfall; of rose-gilt moonlight and shifting grasslands and the rush of silver-tipped waves over dark shores, waiting until he feels her mind stir before the images he sends begin to shift in focus, the rolling plains and oceans giving way to a cluster of pale-walled buildings hunkered low under blue-grey crags, and then to a hangar populated by shuttles bearing a familiar spoked insignia.

Finally, with a mental throat-clearing loud and awkward enough to wake her from half a galaxy away, a name and set of coordinates in her head. His swift retreat from the bond leaves an absence in its wake, unwelcome in a way that doesn’t bear thinking about, but Rey’s already scrambling out of her bunk and racing to chart her course across the stars.

-

The _Falcon_ pierces the atmosphere and his presence on the planet below is like a beacon, a singing thread she follows over the grasslands that cover most of this continent until she can feel it, that other heart thrumming away under her own, calling out _here, so close, not far now—_

The world curves and the prairie gives way to a vast swathe of woodland, trees straight and towering as spires crowned in silver cutting through the plains like a wide, spectral river. Rey brings the ship in low, guiding it to the nearest edge of the forest, and when she steps out under the eaves the breath catches in her throat.

From above the trees had seemed close-knit, woven together in a dense and lofty canopy that in the late hour glimmered like mist shot through with starlight, but their slender trunks are sparse enough on the ground to allow for growth on the forest floor—which, in this season, means a carpet of millions upon millions of tiny blue flowers, shaped like bells and softly fragrant. She almost doesn’t want to tread on the delicate blooms but the bond is tugging insistently at that place below her breastbone and she knows he’s minutes away from her now, and he’s called her here for a purpose.

-

A slow lavender twilight is furling over the plains when she comes upon him near the wood’s edge. It softens the lines of him a bit, bathes him in the blues and purples of evening and deepens the shadows under his eyes to near-bruises. The Force moves within and around him, the bond dancing through it like moonlight on the sea.

Rey slows her pace to inspect him through the humming thread of their connection. She’s given it colours in her mind over the years, this living link that binds them, and it occurs to her that the shades of nightfall that surround Kylo now are those she associates with the rare moments it’s at peace.

He looks different—though, she could’ve seen as much even without an avenue into the heart of him. His hair is longer than it was last time she saw him, his jaw touched with a few days’ worth of stubble, and with a cape of charcoal-grey draped about his shoulders and a contemplative turn to his features he’s another man altogether to the one in her memory, the one who is now little more than just that; a memory. A ghost, who grows dimmer and dimmer every day she's spent with this living, breathing man in her head.

He still favours dark colours, cleaves to his high collars and long sleeves like an armour he can never quite leave behind, but stripped of all that black he looks less…stark, somehow.

An onlooker, if there were any, might observe his colours are almost the mirror of hers.

He turns towards her and for a split second the world tilts sideways, Kylo’s unguarded awareness pulling her along the bond and granting Rey a momentary glimpse of herself through his eyes.

Stunned, she jerks to a stop, forcing her vision to focus and drawing her end of the bond a little closer about herself. The reality of how he sees her—which can’t quite be reality at all, _can it?_ —brings heat flooding into her cheeks.

Maybe it’s only the way the shadows fall, that she walks into the last light of day splintering through the trees and its diffuse warmth finds her face at just the right moment, but in Kylo’s thoughts her edges are softened too. The old fatigue, the hollows under her eyes no amount of rest has been able to ease, all smooth away, and Rey notices only the freckles and flushed skin, the way her hair shifts in the breeze and the evening light gathers in her eyes. Through _his_ eyes she is something she’s never seen before in her own reflection, something touched with grace and softness and earthlight and _strength,_ the Force moving around her too and _—oh—_

His Force signature...

It robs her of breath, the realisation that where the darkness had pulled at him so intensely the last time she saw him, Kylo has drawn back from that edge in the months since and now dwells somewhere altogether closer to equilibrium.

How had she never noticed, through the bond? She knows that she doesn’t walk in the light entirely, never has, and they have ever been each other’s dark mirror, exposing the best and worst of one another to themselves, but it's apparently slipped her notice entirely until now that they have become more alike than she'd thought. Rey draws an unsteady breath, taking in the change in him. Between them, the Force is awash with a mingling of uncertainty and relief, fascination and apprehension, her own astonishment, and beneath it a steady unfurling of wonder that’s all Kylo.

He's still looking at her intently, but she notices the faintest flush of colour high in his cheeks.

Which provokes another realisation—one that makes her own face burn anew. If she's picking up on his regard then it's entirely probable, even _likely,_ that Kylo has just felt everything she'd thought of him.

 _Oh, hells._ She’s forgotten the aching, unguarded _vulnerability_ that nearness to him brings, the way things can just...slip through if they’re not careful. Never anything useful, no, only the things they’d both prefer the other never saw, to spare themselves the mortification of their innermost thoughts laid out to be picked over like scrap parts in the sun.

Knowing full well she's probably blushing wildly, Rey does the only thing she can think of, which is to shove that particular thought aside for later and walk up to Kylo like she’d noticed nothing.

“You’ve been quiet,” she says by way of greeting, unable to keep the sour edge from her voice.

He doesn’t answer, turning away from her to look out towards the forest’s edge where the trees give way to rolling meadowland, sea-blue grasses drifting in the night wind.

Rey rolls her eyes.

He _has_ been quiet. In the months since they parted ways he’s opened the bond only long enough to reach out and deposit locations in her mind before withdrawing again, keeping her at as near to arm’s length as he can when it’s their minds and hearts that are linked. Rey isn’t sure she’d done an especially good job of hiding her relief when he left it open this time.

“The facility is over that ridge,” he says when she reaches him, tilting his chin to the northeast and the rise of purplish fells in the distance. “The storms on this world are fierce—I have observed sporadic power outages in parts of the compound, and it should not be difficult to sneak in under cover of the weather and set charges around the comms tower. Then it will simply be a matter of detonating them at the proper moment, and making for the officers’ block and taking the base. But—” he swallows, his jaw going taut and the rest of him following, and when Rey feels something sick coil in the Force she knows what he’ll say before he can get the words out. “There are children in there.”

 _Children. Future ‘troopers._ She’d known, of course she’d known. This isn’t the first breadcrumb of his she’s followed, the first remote installation she’s been able to hand over to the Resistance thanks to her _anonymous informant_ , and it won’t be the first hundred or even thousand child soldiers they’ve been able to free thanks to Kylo’s restless, relentless search for vengeance and whatever small measure of atonement he can find in this life.

It’s the first time he’s waited around for Rey to catch up, though. After the desert he’d gone quiet, severing the bond unexpectedly after they’d reached their tenuous truce. She'd spent two long months thinking him dead before he'd reached out again, and periodically thereafter, opening himself up to her only long enough to leave the names of worlds and key First Order agents in her mind before withdrawing again. There hadn’t been anything she could do about it: he doesn’t trust himself around her, she knows, doesn’t trust the things in his mind or his own strength of will to keep them quiet.

She has no reason to trust him, either, but here and now is the first time they’ve been on the same world since they parted ways in the desert, and the changes in him strike her deeply.

His shoulders are hunched, hands balled into fists at his side—that, at least, hasn't changed. On a whim Rey reaches down and lets her knuckles brush along his, pushing warmth and steadiness through the bond to him until his fingers uncurl and he nods at her gratefully. She wonders what it means that he’s only wearing a glove on the right.

“I’ve already contacted the fleet,” she tells him. “The nearest squadron’s less than three days away. Transports will be a bit longer but if we take out the comms they can be in and out before the First Order can get their boots on. They’ll take care of any defences.”

Kylo nods, his gaze still lost somewhere in the grasslands.

“I don’t know if you want to still be here, when they come,” she continues, thinking of how he can barely stand to linger in one place long enough to reach out to her, let alone wait for an answer; how he’s so often gone from a system before she learns he was ever there, only the memory of his Force signature lingering like the scent of ozone after a lightning strike.

His restlessness infects her, but the truth is they’ll both be in danger if the Order catches him.

(She’s gotten rather good at pretending that this is why it matters to her.)

“You don’t have to stay,” she tells him. “I can go in, if you point me in the right direction.”

Part of her wants to. Part of her _itches_ to go in there alone and tear the place apart, take its officers’ heads and break its doors open and deliver a tiny _fraction_ of justice to those imprisoned within. For Finn, and for all the others he crusades to liberate.

The darkness sings to her of vengeance, of a balancing of the scales, of a _making right._

The Goazon haggler in her knows that blood will not pay for blood, and if Kylo can walk the hard road now then it would shame her to do less.

It’s just—even after so many years, it’s hard thinking she doesn’t have to work alone anymore.

“I would've set the charges myself, had that been why I called to you. I have enough on board my ship,” he admits. “I merely—wished to wait, once I knew you would come.” _Perhaps this might work better with two of us?_

Rey’s brow furrows. There’d been no urgent reason for his summons, then, he’d just…wanted her to be there?

Letting a little more warmth bleed through the bond, Rey brushes the back of her hand lightly against his again and watches some of the tension slide from his shoulders. “Here I am,” she murmurs, stepping back from him to sink, gracelessly, to the ground, legs sprawled out in front of her as she settles in to wait.

It doesn’t take long for Kylo to join her. He kneels down the way a great tree falls, slowly and then all at once, his long limbs rearranging themselves to settle a yard or so away from her. Bringing his knees up, he rests his forearms on them and proceeds to sit in silence, glowering out into the gathering darkness. She can sense something stewing inside him—something he wants to tell her, if he can only get it out.

The moments stretch on, no sense of urgency in the thing that loops between them: the nights on this world are long and they have time, hours and hours of it. She can wait.

Rey lowers herself onto her elbows, and then to her back, and lets her gaze drift up into the silvery canopy overhead.

It feels like hours pass before he finally speaks.

“I had to do it,” he says eventually, his voice as soft as the evening light in the trees. His eyes flick briefly down, meeting her questioning glance with one that begs understanding. “To shut you out.”

Rey looks away before he can. “Alright,” she says carefully. She hadn’t actually anticipated an explanation of that.

“I didn’t—” Kylo lets out an uneven breath. “I didn’t _want_ to. I had to be sure that I could do it. Alone. That I could— _be_ alone. I am not…accustomed, to it. To there not being—”

 _Someone there. In here._ He frowns down at the space between his knees. _It wasn’t—wasn’t you, Rey._

Oh. He’d felt that, then.

She’s reaching for him before she quite realises, touching her fingertips to the back of his hand in wordless acceptance of both the clarification and the half-apology of it. She knows she’s never been the only voice in his head. This, of all things, Kylo probably doesn’t need to excuse himself for.

Still—

“I know,” she says softly, scraping her short nails over his skin until his eyes fall closed. “I know that, now.”

She tries not to think about how she’s missed hearing her name in his voice, keeps her gaze determinedly outward, giving them both the space they need to breathe when the Force wraps around them so closely and everything feels just a little bit too _much_.

“I felt you,” Kylo tries again, “every time I severed the link. I—” _I was never glad to do it, either. I am sorry._

Surprise ripples through her that he’d come out and say it so plainly. It doesn’t feel right, hearing him so penitent. It doesn’t fit with the prideful picture she still holds in her head, of the moody knight with the violent temper and the sardonic streak a star-system wide. “I’m not sure you should be,” she says. This is too close to the unknown for both of them.

“There are many who’d say I have much to apologise for,” he murmurs wryly.

Rey snorts, turns away to look out over the plains again. “I think we’re past that, you and me.”

 _Even so._ His knuckles tense under her touch, hands flexing restlessly over his knees. “I never went back, after. I couldn’t risk it. I know I wouldn’t be able to keep him out, if I were in his presence.” _It’s like with you and I, when we are near…how much easier it is to speak like this, and not with words. Only…no, it is the furthest thing from this, from what binds us_. “I still feel him searching, at the edges of my mind. He will not let me go without—consequences.” _And I did not want those for you._ He hunches over himself again, features twisting in a dark snarl. Rey feels her own jaw clench at the thought of the spectre that haunts their every step, that has haunted Kylo since before he was born.

But he had kept her safe, these last months. He’d needed to claw his way free of Snoke on his own, but he’d needed her away from any chance his master might look into his head and find her, while he tore apart his own psyche to unpick the corruption that had been planted there before anyone knew to stop it.

It can’t have been easy, or painless, and he’d shielded her from all of it. Rey knows she could’ve helped him through it, though she isn’t sure where the impulse came from, but she’s suddenly terribly grateful that he’d done it anyway.

And—it had worked, hadn’t it? She can feel it in the Force, how even the darkness that inhabits him feels— _lighter,_ somehow. How the parts of him that had been broken and allowed to mend wrong, he had re-broken and set back in their proper places; how he is not yet healed or _complete_ or free by any measure but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. He is unfinished in so many ways. They both are. They match, present imperfect mirrors to each other, the darkness in him calling out to its counterpart in her and the light too, and everything in between, and Rey has never felt such surety in her conviction that the path they stumble along is the right one than she does now, with the bond humming contentedly between them and the prospect of an _end_ to this war in sight.

She taps the back of his knuckles with her fingertips a few times and lets her hand fall back onto her stomach, expelling as she does so several months’ worth of wonderment and confusion and that strange, unsettling _loneliness_ into the mild air.

“I know why you did it,” she says, “I’m not…angry, that’s not what you felt.”

Not wholly, anyway. It wasn’t that Kylo had shut her out: they aren’t much more than tenuous allies, after all, and she hadn’t become _that_ accustomed to leaving the bond open (and even if she had, they’d only begun doing so because it felt better than doing otherwise, because whatever they are they’re no longer at war and while the bond had twisted and warped under their continued denial of it, they don’t have the right to demand such vulnerability from each other yet).

It’s just that, well…a word would’ve been appreciated.

 _I know you needed to do it alone, or I would’ve been there._ “I would’ve—made you let me help, or something.” She nudges something to the forefront of her mind, a memory: the pair of them, bloodied and bruised and _tired,_ her reaching out to him with a trembling hand as he kneels in the sand at her feet. _That was what I meant, by that._

Whatever they are, they are together in this.

_And—_

_—thank you._

He’d known that before she did. He’s known it from the moment they first pushed their way into each other’s heads and lost the way out again.

The quiet swells between them. It is a strange peace, between these two who’ve left such scars on one another, but a peace of such profound rarity that neither would let it end if it was up to them.

If it was up to Kylo alone, it never would. Rey is the one to break it, as nightfall turns the fells to a violet-blue and the grassy plains to a great sighing ocean, and in the star-scattered sky the larger of Ljós’ four moons climbs slowly out from behind the faraway ridge. In this moment is enough just to sit, here on the edge of the forest of silver-crowned trees clustered like nebulae under the moon as it rises, pale and blush-pink along its shadowed lower hemisphere.

In this moment, it is enough just to breathe.

Even in the badlands, when the winds were at rest and the sands lay still and she knew she was the only living thing for miles around, Rey had never known a quiet like this—like the universe has caught its breath, only the soft rush of the wind in the trees and the grass and the slow, steady breathing of the man beside her, the arrhythmic thrumming of her own heartbeat in her ears.

It takes an act of real will to open her mouth and shatter it.

“I have a mission,” she begins, keeping her gaze on the distant ridge. In her peripherals Kylo shifts. He’s listening intently, she knows. “I’ve been tracking things down, and there’s—a lead, I suppose, on something, from the days of the Empire. Something that was of interest to the Emperor, and to Snoke, apparently. Luke found it in one of the journals that Poe brought back from Ovanis.”

Kylo says nothing but she feels his curiosity, and the pangs of unease that meet each name as it passes her lips.

It isn’t quite remorse, but it’s not nothing, and Rey can’t find it in herself to pity it.

She lets it pass without comment. Some things are between a person and their conscience, and Kylo’s is as easily-spooked as a skittermouse without her poking at it.

“I’m headed there next,” she carries on. “I don’t think it’ll be dangerous, nothing I can’t handle, but—having someone around who knows the Empire…who might have a better idea of what I’m looking for…might be useful…”

From the corner of her eye she sees him turn abruptly to stare at her, but she keeps looking ahead, following the slow crawl of moonlight over the hills. Her heart beats faster, or maybe it’s his. She moves slightly, lets her weight shift onto her other hip—which happens to bring her a hair’s breadth nearer to Kylo—as his unguarded thoughts bleed across their connection faster than he can yank them back.

_Rey—_

_—Rey, yes, anywhere._

His eagerness tugs at something under her ribcage, less for the mission or the long journey it promises or even the chance to show off his knowledge of Imperial history (which still outstrips hers, limited to the small but significant part her homeworld played in its final months, and probably will until she relents and finally lets him share everything he knows like he’s been dying to since they met) than the prospect of no longer being alone. He’s kept himself apart from her in every way since they buried their enmity under the desert stars, but he hasn’t enjoyed it much.

“Don’t get too excited,” she nudges his arm with her elbow, unable to keep a smile from working its way onto her face. “You haven’t heard where it is yet.”

-

Finn sounds almost apologetic when he passes along the message.

“I want you to know,” he begins, brow furrowed in displeasure even as he tries to stave off hers, “that I talked to them, and I _tried_ to talk them into sending someone else, but, well—you know command—”

In Finn’s opinion (which is one of the very few she holds as having any worth), the whole thing sounds like a cruel and unusual punishment of which Rey is far from deserving, even if she _had_ ditched him, her _best friend_ , to go haring off around the galaxy in search of temples and crystals and eldritch beasts and Maker-knows-what while _some of them_ were stuck back on base fighting out the dying days of a war.

(Like she didn’t ask him to come with her, back in the beginning—like she doesn’t repeat that invitation at least three times a year, and there isn’t still a bunk on the _Falcon_ with his name on it. Like Finn isn’t the most at home in his own skin he’s ever been, trusted and respected and _free_ among Leia’s fighters, building something for himself that's more than just a name.

Like he wasn’t the one to urge her to go, when her eyes were clouded over with starlight and her dreams were filled with another system’s constellations, and she could barely sit still for the nagging press of _something_ calling out to her from the other side of the sky.)

It still warms her, the knowledge that there’s someone at her back—someone prepared to champion her even when she’s so rarely around anymore, has never really called herself Resistance or Jedi or anything like that, has only ever tried to discover and hold onto what being _Rey_ means out beyond the confines of the desert.

It feels like roots. It feels like _home_.

-

Through the bond she pushes the impression of heat, of dry thirst in the back of the throat and the abrasion of sand under roughspun clothes, of sunsets the colour of blood and the bone-chilling cold unique to nighttime in the desert. She shows Kylo the _Inflictor_ and the Spire and the shadowed face of the necropolis under Carbon Ridge, fills his head with the howling of the _X’us’R’iia_ through the whittled-down hulls of starships and the endless wheeling dance of the stars overhead. She gives him fourteen years’ worth of sense-memories and with them conjures the image of a planet trapped in slumber; a withered, starving world with something broken at its heart.

The world that made her.

The world she hasn’t set foot on for nearly six years.

“Oh.” Kylo sounds almost _pained._ He glances down at her, the grimace on his face a near-match for hers. “You aren’t serious.”

She doesn’t think she’ll ever get over the strangeness of smiling around him, but Rey feels the corners of her traitor lips twitch upwards anyway.

“Deadly. Still up for it?”

There’s long moment’s silence, during which she can feel Kylo’s mind searching through the memories she’d given him—and others she hadn’t, the ones he’d taken from her, so long ago. She can feel his intrigue for the folklore of her homeworld, the stories she remembers still even if she can’t recall where she heard them, of dead empires and dying gods that couldn’t endure in the wasteland, the wild-eyed holy men that made their way out into the desert in search of—something, something Rey had never truly understood until she’d first left Jakku’s atmosphere and saw the universe unfurl around her. She’d never felt that call to abandon everything and disappear into the wilderness, because her own fate lay in the stars.

Something new stirs in her mind, and Rey frowns at the unexpected brush of interest across the bond.

If there’s one thing she’d never expect to feel from him—or _anyone_ —at the prospect of going back to Jakku...

But then, she’s had firsthand insight into the eccentricities of Ren’s habits. This oughtn’t surprise her.

His full lips twitch as though he’s fighting a smirk. He shouldn’t, Rey decides. It might make him look less _brooding_.

It might even make him look— _pleasant_.

“Jakku,” he says softly, and yes, that’s definitely anticipation thrumming through the bond.

Unfathomable, she thinks.

But then, he has been on his own a long time. It does things to people.

(The fact that she’s sitting here contemplating what he would look like if he only smiled is proof enough of _that_.)

“Jakku,” she agrees ruefully.

Kylo grins suddenly, and Rey stares as all of her worst suspicions are confirmed.

“Lead the way.”

-

“What does it mean?” she asks, as they walk back through the woods toward her ship, four days and one successful mission later. “The name of this place? I never looked it up.”

Surprise flits across his face, followed swiftly by a wry sort of smile.

“This planet has two names, actually, though they are alike. Some charts refer to it as Lioth. It means ‘rhyme.’”

Rey hums, thinking of the four moons that orbit this world and their endless circling dance through the heavens, couplet satellites in eternal flight over the plains. “And the other?”

Kylo releases a breath that catches on a laugh. It suits him too, she realises.

“ _Ljós._ Light.”

**Author's Note:**

> 'in icelandic the word for light is _ljós_ / and the word for poem is _ljoð_  
>  what happens at the end can change everything  
> it is said everything in the universe contains the same matter / that we begin somewhere in the same place  
> the matter responsible is as close as one last end veering off'  
> — souvankham thammavongsa, 'ljós, from light'
> 
> this has been sitting in my gdrive since last summer and is categorically Not the fic i meant to post tonight and yet. here we are


End file.
